The paper investigates multitask regression where different predictors may have varying degrees of coefficient sharing across tasks. It introduces a framework that quantifies sharing by the number of active predictors and the total number of task-specific coefficient deviations, and proposes a pairwise penalty estimator that achieves matching upper and lower bounds in terms of these quantities. The method also handles scenarios where a large subset of tasks shares an identical coefficient vector, with explicit sample‑size conditions ensuring exact pooling of those tasks while allowing others to differ.
arXiv:2607. 00995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most existing multitask learning approaches are limited by their reliance on task-specific loss functions tailored to the scale and type of each outcome.
The paper introduces COVER, a multi‑task learning framework that regularizes covariate overlap to mitigate the negative effects of sharing information across tasks with differing covariate distributions and response relationships. COVER blends a common component function, a shared neural representation, and low‑dimensional task‑specific coefficients, using taskwise second‑moment matrices to guide coefficient integration. The authors provide theoretical bias‑variance analysis, oracle inequalities, and neural‑network convergence rates, and demonstrate that COVER outperforms existing deep‑learning and statistical integration methods in simulations and a GTEx central‑nervous‑system study.
arXiv:2603. 05060v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi--task learning seeks to improve the generalization error by leveraging the common information shared by multiple related tasks.
arXiv:2607. 16554v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In multi-task learning (MTL) negative transfer is often considered as an optimization artifact, but it can also be viewed as a consequence of limited shared capacity and weak task redundancy.
The paper introduces a data‑free method for model merging that estimates per‑layer covariance matrices directly from difference matrices, eliminating the need for auxiliary data. This approach reduces computational costs while maintaining a principled interference‑minimization framework. Experiments on vision and language benchmarks with models from 86 M to 7 B parameters show that the method outperforms existing data‑free merging techniques.
arXiv:2608. 05172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task-based framework in economics models occupations as bundles of tasks.
arXiv:2609.24517v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging aims to combine multiple fine-tuned models derived from a common pretrained model into a single multi-task model without additional joi...
arXiv:2607. 27177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective collaboration with novel and diverse partners is a crucial skill for autonomous agents.
arXiv:2607. 02681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating information across related tasks can improve estimation and prediction in transfer, multi-task, and federated learning, but contamination and heterogeneity make robust borrowing challenging.
arXiv:2512. 01461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling multi-task capabilities without additional training.
The paper introduces Net Utility, a data‑free metric for selecting which singular directions of low‑rank adapters (LoRAs) to keep when merging across tasks. By scoring each direction for task utility and interference, and then globally selecting the highest‑scoring directions under a total budget constraint, the method avoids the uniform‑budget assumption that hampers existing merging techniques. Experiments on vision and language tasks show that Net Utility‑based rank allocation yields about a 2% performance gain over other merging methods.
The paper introduces a new multi‑task model‑merging framework that tackles task interference by projecting task vectors into a high‑dimensional sparse feature space using Sparse Autoencoders, enabling feature‑level disentanglement before fusion. It also proposes a lightweight Group‑Ranked Zeroth‑Order Optimizer to identify task‑critical layers for selective merging, reducing computational overhead. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B and Qwen2.5‑7B show consistent performance gains over several baselines across reasoning, code generation, instruction following, and general knowledge tasks, with a 2.78% improvement in a highly conflicting four‑task setting.